The first gold in our west was discovered, less than twenty-five years ago, in California. The bullion since found in that region, or others between it and Nebraska, amounts to fourteen hundred million dollars, half our National Debt when it was largest, half as much as Peru has yielded in three centuries, or Mexico in a century and a half. The yield of 1872 was $62,236,913, which is almost four millions ($3,952,884) more than that of 1871. The Comstock lode in Nevada is the richest mine in the world. Where so much gold and silver is harvested in so little time, there must be a great importation of all products which cannot be there grown. This importation must be the larger, because wages are higher in our western mines than anywhere else in the world. Unskilled labor there commands from $3 to $4 per day, besides board, which is at the least six times as much as it could earn in Great Britain or Germany.

  But political economy and common sense agree in teaching that "consumption is in proportion to the value of the labor of the consuming class." Therefore each of the miners who will look to Nebraska for supplies, must consume as much as six foreign miners.

  Moreover, old mines, are daily worked more extensively, and new mines opened every day. But the demand for agricultural supplies must grow with the growth, and strengthen with the strength, of our mining world.

  Whenever, then, the Illinois farmer says to the Nebraskan, "How can you bear to live so far off from Chicago, which forwards my grain to the East, or to Europe?" The answer may well be, "How can you bear to live so far off from a million mountaineers who offer me gold for bread, and whose trade is worth as much as that of six millions of the foreign starvelings, for feeding whom you are competing with Russian serfs? I am at the very gates of my market, you are four thousand miles from yours. Millions are running away from your foreign market, millions are flocking to my home market. I am far from the eastern market, but the farther the better, for I am the nearer the western. Thank God for every inch of my distance!"

  An ancient speculator is said to have hung over Athens in a balloon, and intercepted the incense as it rose from earthly altars to the throne of Jove. Thus holding the goose by the neck, he held the worshippers below at his mercy. But, by descending into caves.

  But the western markets of Nebraska will improve, not only because the million of miners there will soon become ten, but because the mining regions must be a grand centre of manufactures. If ore is worth carrying from Utah to Wales for smelting it must in the long run be better worth smelting at the mouth of the mine. "Avoid middle men," is the maxim which Rothschild said made him rich. Miners and smelters will avoid them.

  Again, the mountains are full of coal, iron, and water-power. Therefore, they are exactly the places to which manufacturing capital turns as naturally as the needle to the north. It is already on its march thither, though the trans-continental railroad, which was needed to prepare its way, has been finished only four years. More manufacturers than miners will soon call on Nebraska for food.

  Manufacturers are coming to understand and obey that economic law, which either forces them into convenient proximity to the sources of their supplies, not only of raw material but of food, or punishes all the parties concerned in its infraction.

  But manufacturing growth will stimulate diversified agriculture. It is well said: "The most remunerative of all agricultural gifts are not exportable. These include potatoes, beets, turnips, cabbages, all green vegetables, all orchard products, poultry, veal, mutton, milk, berries and eggs. A neighborhood market for these things makes the difference between the price of land near a city and in the new West. Land yields roots by tons, wheat and corn only by the bushel. In even pace with diversities of produce will be the advance of high farming - aiming not to rob the soil of its fertility, but really to cultivate it - not sending all crops abroad, but refreshing the energy of lands by returning to them a fair portion of their products after they have served their human uses."

  A well-considered article, in a recent number of the British Quarterly, shows that British manufactures must decrease. The British Islands now produce half the coal dug in the world, and with it smelt, and manufacture half the iron in the world, and more than a third of all other metals, except gold and silver. But let the con-

  Ten years' experience has proved that cattle, on those uplands, will thrive unsheltered all the year round, yes, thanks to "winter grazing," will grow fat enough for market though unfed with grain, hay or even salt. Sheep need slight shelter, and some food, but are exempt from all diseases generated by wetness elsewhere. Here then, the meat to feed and the wool to clothe the continent must be

  No streams on the plains compare with these for timber. On their bottoms there are groves of white oak, ash, cottonwood and elm. The average width of the main valley is nine miles. The smaller streams have narrower valleys, but they all abound in grass. So do the divides between them, though with other varieties.

  The farm-hunter, who now journeys westward from Burlington, sometimes says to himself: "Why did I not come west soon enough to get land near Chicago?" However fertile his Nebraska acres, be compares himself to the sportsman who out off a lion's paw, but when asked why he had not cut off his head, was obliged to confess that that had been cut off already. Let the settler of to-day be consoled by the opening of new and diversified markets westward. He has not come too late. His lion is like the classical hydra, which no sooner lost one head than it shot forth two others.

  On the whole, the rapid growth of Nebraska is certain, for it is founded on an agricultural basis which cannot be shaken, any more than its soil or climate can be changed.

  With a climate neither torrid nor frigid, but mild and healthy, with a soil, along streams, abounding in that Nile-like alluvion which gave Egypt its fertility, and on the divides still more productive in wet seasons, with fruits which won the highest prize at the National Pomological Convention, with an area of school land as large as the State of Connecticut, sold at more than five times the government rate, with schools good enough for the best yet cheap enough for the poorest, with a University better endowed than that in any other new State, with a State tax of three mills, with twenty thousand homesteads which pay no tax, and local taxes no larger than a majority of the people in each locality choose, with the earth-encircling thoroughfare of travel and traffic running through its whole length, with railroads built by the money of non-residents converging in its capital from every quarter, and diverging to all desirable markets, how can Nebraska fail to be the veritable land of promise to which

  Improvement in Illinois was snail-paced at first, for it came in on ox-teams. It entered Iowa on steamboats, and was therefore long confined to the banks of navigable rivers. Its advent into Nebraska was on locomotives, which, plying on iron rivers that render all prairies navigable, leave no corner of them untouched. As much as steam is swifter than a steer, as much as railroads are more pervasive than rivers so much more rapid and ubiquitous development than that of Illinois and Iowa may we expect to behold in Nebraska.

  In 1769, England was endeavoring to dam up the westward flow of emigration at the Alleghanies. In 1869, that tidal wave flowing at first along navigable rivers, and afterward on iron rivers which bring all prairies near to tidewater, had passed the two great continental rivers, and the two mountain ranges beyond them, reached the Pacific, and united it to the Atlantic, by a daily ebb and flow. All opposing forces, bugbears concerning Indians, agues, deserts, as well as all royal edicts and foreign claims, which said to it "Hitherto shalt thou go and no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed," fared as King Canute did, when crowned, sceptered and enthroned on the English beach, he forbade the billows of the advancing tide to wet his sacred feet.. And so it shall be forever.

  Irrepressible hosts from all nations, with God for their landlord, temperance, industry and honesty for Mentors, will never cease to bless the Greeley slogan, or whatever other impulse brings them to a home in the great gardens near the setting sun.